The shiny part or business end of any cooler, and Cryorig opted for the mirror finish approach to the CPU contact plate. Not the smoothest, but as our tests mostly show, it is not always important.
If you rub thermal paste into the base plate before mounting, this will fill a good number of scratches or imperfections that may cause performance issues.
Installation
We are not going to be too down on the be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 3, but one of the main pain areas, if not the only one with this superb cooler, is the installation issues. With the Dark Rock Pro 3 as a baseline, the R1 Ultimate is a dream to fit, in line with the Noctua coolers. Cryorig are calling this their MultiSeg Quick Mount System, and it works really well.
Mounting the R1 Ultimate on our test bed was simple, and we had no interference issues with normal height memory modules. The Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 modules have a raised loop at the top which was cleared by the fan without issue.
It’s not a criticism, but a point to note on the shrouds. Even though the fans are adjustable in height, you may find you lose cooling performance if you raise them up too much, missing the advertised benefit of having them aligned.
Test Set Up
We tested the Cryorig R1 Ultimate CPU Cooler for sound and cooling performance using an i7 LGA2011-v3 set up. We tested two configurations, stock and overclock both with turbo.
- Operating System: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
- Processor: Intel i7-5820K
- Motherboard: Asus Rampage V Extreme Motherboard
- Graphics: MSI GTX 970 GAMING Twin Frozr V
- Memory: 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 2666Mhz
- Drives: Crucial BX100 500Gb SSD
- PSU: Corsair HX1000i
- Chassis: MicroCool Banchetto 101 Chassis
Software used for load tests and temperature capture;
- HWiNFO64
- AIDA64 Engineer
We ran the AIDA64 Extreme stability test in 30 minute batches and recorded the results. We used the Core Max result as there was typically a variance across the cores of a couple of degrees. We only selected the cache, FPU and CPU tests, so no other component would generate impacting heat during the tests. We always “run in” out CPU cooler installations, essential to maximizing the performance of the cooler before testing begins.
Cryorig R1 Ultimate CPU Cooler Review
Package - 9
Performance - 9
Price - 9
Consumer Experience - 9.5
9.1
The Cryorig R1 Ultimate CPU Cooler is an excellent cooler from a company trying to make a name for themselves. If you look at the Cryorig website it's very modern and well put together, a lot like the Cryorig R1 Ultimate. That is probably the main theme from Cryorig, and by far, they do not look like a small company that have only been around for a couple of years. For us, the Cryorig R1 Ultimate CPU Cooler managed a second place, but we need to be very clear, it wasn't by much at all.
